Why Experience Is The Worst Thing To Hire For
And what the research says you should be looking at instead.
If you have ever hired someone with an impressive CV and watched them fail in the role, you already know something that most businesses are not willing to admit: experience is not what you think it is.
It feels like a safe bet. Ten years in the industry. Done this role before. Knows the sector. Hire them and the risk goes down. Except the research says otherwise — and it has been saying so for decades.
What experience actually predicts
In 1998 Frank Schmidt and John Hunter published what remains the most comprehensive analysis of hiring research ever conducted. They synthesised 85 years of selection science to produce validity estimates for every major hiring method — a validity estimate being a measure of how accurately a factor predicts actual job performance.
Years of experience came in at a validity of 0.18.
To put that in context — that is roughly the same predictive power as knowing someone's shoe size. It tells you what someone has done before. It tells you almost nothing about how they will perform in your role, in your environment, under your leadership, at this stage of your business.
Why we keep using it anyway
Experience is legible. It sits on a CV in a format we can read, compare, and evaluate quickly. Five years versus ten years. Did the same role or a similar one. Worked in the same industry. These are data points that feel meaningful because they are easy to process.
The problem is that ease of processing is not the same as predictive validity. We weight experience heavily in hiring decisions not because it works but because it is familiar and it is there. It requires no structured assessment, no scoring framework, no investment in understanding what the role actually demands behaviourally. It is a shortcut that feels like rigour.
The Halo Effect compounds this. If a candidate has an impressive track record — a recognisable employer, a long tenure, a title that maps cleanly to the role — we unconsciously rate everything else about them more highly. Their communication seems clearer. Their answers seem stronger. Their potential seems greater. We are not evaluating them. We are confirming what we already decided the moment we read their CV.
What experience cannot tell you
Experience tells you what someone has done in a different context. It does not tell you:
How they will perform under the specific pressure profile of your environment. How quickly they will adapt when the role does not match their expectations. Whether their working style is compatible with your culture. How they respond to feedback, conflict, and ambiguity in your specific management structure. Whether they have the self-generated drive to perform without the infrastructure of a larger business behind them.
These are not minor details. They are the variables that determine whether a hire succeeds or fails — and none of them appear on a CV.
What actually predicts performance
The same Schmidt and Hunter research that found experience validity at 0.18 identified the factors that genuinely predict performance. Cognitive ability — how someone thinks, reasons, and processes new information — is the strongest overall predictor across all job types. Learning agility — how quickly someone builds competence in unfamiliar territory — is consistently among the highest performers. Structured behavioural interviews, which assess how someone has actually behaved in specific situations, predict performance at significantly higher rates than unstructured conversational interviews.
Work sample tests — giving a candidate a real task that mirrors the actual job — are among the most predictive methods available. More predictive than interview performance. More predictive than references. More predictive than years of experience.
None of these require a candidate to have done the exact role before. They require a candidate to demonstrate the behavioural characteristics that will drive performance in this role, in this environment, at this point in time.
The hire that keeps failing
Most businesses have a version of this story. A role that has turned over two or three times. Each time, someone experienced is hired. Each time, it does not work out. The business concludes that the talent is not there — that good people are hard to find.
The more likely explanation is that the role is being hired for on the wrong criteria. Experience in a similar role does not guarantee behavioural fit with this environment. It does not guarantee the pressure resilience the role demands. It does not guarantee the communication style the team needs. It does not guarantee the self-direction required when there is no established infrastructure to lean on.
When a role keeps failing, the question is rarely about candidate quality. It is almost always about the criteria being used to select them — and experience-led hiring is the most common culprit.
What to do instead
Before the next hire, define the role in behavioural terms rather than experience terms. Not ten years in the industry — but what does this person need to do consistently, under pressure, in your specific environment, to perform at a high level? What have previous people in this role struggled with — and what does that tell you about the real demands?
Then assess candidates against that standard. Not against each other, and not against their CVs. Against the behavioural profile the role actually requires.
Experience can be a useful data point. It tells you what contexts someone has operated in and what skills they have likely developed. But it should be one input among many — not the primary filter, and never the deciding factor.
The businesses that consistently make good hiring decisions are not the ones with the best access to experienced candidates. They are the ones with the clearest picture of what the role actually demands — and the most structured process for finding out who can meet it.
WELLPLACED is a behavioural placement methodology built on 85 years of selection science research. If your current hiring process is built around experience and credentials, we should talk.
Book a discovery call at thewellplacedmethod.com.au
